Calling a Person by the Right Name: What Three Historical Figures Rewritten by Wuxia Fiction Teach Sports Journalism

In 2026, on the road up Mount Hua, a group of Taoists from Shaanxi blocked the path of a 79-year-old man: Jin Yong. They wanted no money. They wanted one thing — that their ancestor Yin Zhiping, sixth-generation patriarch of the Quanzhen sect, should not carry in fiction a grave crime he never committed. I have read the account of that blockade more than once, and each time my mind drifts elsewhere. In sport, when a player's name is mispronounced, a club press office corrects it within hours. In literature it took three decades, and the corrected name still does not erase the act attached to it.

The history.ifeng.com piece, unsigned, selects three real people: Lü Wende, Yin Zhiping and Shi Lang. All three have birth and death years, offices held, and traces in the official dynastic histories — the kind of figure whose misrepresentation can actually be checked rather than shrugged off as folklore.

Lü Wende rose from commoner to general, fought on the Jianghuai, Jinghu and Sichuan fronts, relieved Anfeng by feint and broke enemy supply lines at Shouchun. In 1259 he relieved Sichuan and then Ezhou against Kublai. In the novel he trembles before the Mongol advance while Xiangyang survives thanks only to Guo Jing and Huang Rong.

Yin Zhiping lived 1169–1251, styled Qinghezi, succeeded Qiu Chuji as sixth patriarch, accompanied his master to meet Genghis Khan, oversaw compilation of the Da Yuan Xuandu Baozang, and abdicated in favour of Li Zhichang. In the novel he violates Xiao Longnü and later kills himself in shame.

Shi Lang lived 1621–1696, commanded the fleet, beat Liu Guoxuan at Penghu in 1683, memorialised for the retention and garrisoning of Taiwan, and treated Zheng Keshuang and Liu Guoxuan humanely. In the novel he is humiliated repeatedly by Wei Xiaobao and branded a Han traitor.

Set side by side, the three cases are not the same category, even though the headline folds them under a single word. Three distortions belong to three different categories: fabricated conduct, inverted character, and normative political labelling. Lumping them together destroys the only useful thing the material offers — a scale of severity.

Yin Zhiping's is the only file that meets a strict definition of defamation of a real person: a grave sexual crime attributed to a dated patriarch with a documented succession. It is also the file with the strongest evidentiary base — the Qinghe zhenren Beiyou yulu, a statement from the Shandong Taoist Association, and a professor Zuo Hongtao quoted by a national wire service in 2026. Four independent strands for one case. In the other two, most of the core material — the whole of Shi Lang's biography, most of Lü Wende's military record — appears with no source attached at all.

The piece is therefore strongest exactly where its thesis is hardest to defend, and weakest where its thesis is easiest to contest. The article itself concedes that Chinese historians criticised Lü Wende for military errors and for factionalism with Jia Sidao. If so, the novel exaggerated an existing critical tradition rather than inventing from nothing. And the piece omits a detail that makes the Lü family record genuinely mixed: Lü Wenhuan, the general's younger brother, surrendered Xiangyang to the Mongols in 1273. Silence on that point is a selective-framing signal.

Attributing the 1259 Ezhou relief to Lü Wende's personal skill is a further simplification. Historiography generally explains Kublai's withdrawal first by the death of Möngke Khan and the succession crisis; the relief force was a contributing factor.

In 2026, after the Mount Hua blockade, the third revision cycle renamed the character from Yin Zhiping to Zhen Zhibing. That is the cheapest remedy available: it severs the identification between fictional character and real person while preserving the plot beat entirely. The novel still contains a sexual violator; he simply no longer bears a real patriarch's name.

Accountability in historical fiction runs on organised constituencies, not on evidence. Only the file backed by a religious community was corrected. Lü Wende and Shi Lang had no one to speak for them — no blockade, no demand — and so received no revision at all. The same logic governs sport: a club with a lawyer gets a correction the same day, an amateur athlete misdescribed gets nothing.

“Slander” is therefore the wrong instrument. What is missing is not more honest fiction but a mechanism through which real people can answer back. Sport has one: players have unions, lawyers, a right to demand corrections, and reporters who will put the question. Historical figures have none. People remember the player's name; I remember the way he went down in the 89th minute.

Reading The Deer and the Cauldron as the author's settled historical verdict also misreads the register. That novel deconstructs Han-centrism through Wei Xiaobao's own opportunism; the mockery of Shi Lang is voiced by a protagonist whose patriotism the author ironises from the first pages. Taking a cynic's line as the author's own is a misreading — and it is the misreading my own trade commits daily, quoting one sentence from a dressing room and calling it the view of the whole team.

A few years ago I stood in Moscow that summer and understood that football has its own grammar. That grammar begins with calling people by their right names. I mispronounced a player's name at a World Cup, and that was the first time I understood what my job actually was. Over four rest days I replayed the tapes and wrote out the pronunciation of 736 players at the tournament in their own languages. Nobody asked me to. But a name mispronounced three times in one half is a professional failure with no defence.

The original article is valuable as a map of a real problem: historical fiction borrows real names as raw material, and no court adjudicates it. It is not, however, a reliable file. Three cases, three severities, one renaming, and one silence.

A name is a contract. It does not say you must write well of the person; it says that if you borrow the name you must return what you borrowed. Fiction may invent a character; it may not invent a name. And if a patriarch who died in 1251 had to wait until 2026 to get his name back, the question left is simple: who blocks the road next?